The song “God Part II” on the album “Rattle and Hum” by U2 has the lyrics: “The rich get healthy, while the sick stay poor.” Bono sung those words in 1988. Since then, a number of researchers have tackled what exactly is the link between wealth and health, and why.

At first glance, one would expect a simple explanation: people with more money live longer. Clearly such a relationship cannot be strictly linear, as people don’t fall dead if they declare bankruptcy and at some point, wealth has a ceiling in which no matter how much more money you have to spend, you can’t buy any more medicine or access to doctors.

Yet it isn’t all about access either. Studies in European countries with free access to health care have still demonstrated that income disparities in longevity are considerable, so it is more than just access that creates the difference and that difference is significant.

A Harvard study examined de-identified tax records, the United States Census and the Medicare database, along with other population surveys, to try to determine the link between longevity and income in people age 40 or older. Obviously, they had to adjust the income and how it related to health for the retired group separately from those employed — the higher earner at age 61 who retired at age 62 was kept a high earner at age 63 using their study design.

They looked at 14 years’ worth of data to see trends related to income both longitudinally per person and by each age group. For example, there were a lot of low-earning 40 year olds in every year that were studied. There were fewer 45 year olds in that same income percentile because some of them got better jobs and some of them died.

They found that men in the top 1% income bracket lived to 87.3 years old, a whole 14.6 years longer than men in the bottom 1% of income, living only 72.7 years. For women, the gap was narrower with the top 1% living until 88.9 years and the lowest 1% at 78.8 years.

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